Changes

And make no mistake about it, Krysia's story is a new one. (Think Trisha, but with a K.) In the many photos we get in this book we see her as a slightly frumpy, slightly severe girl with a most unfortunate bowl cut, her facial expression varying between cynical and sternly determined. But, of course, a lot of her story was not told by a camera. It's down to her memory to bring to us the winters in the farm, where you were provided with a ladder to prop against the snow that you cleared from the dorm door to walk on the surface crust, on a level with your eaves. It's down to her mistakenly wandering about in the night in one instance, thinking bright lights were bringing her and a companion home when they were actually the eyes of starving wolves. It's down to the nine year old's point of view, that conveys the horror of your mother being taken away by interrogation by the NKVD regarding your father's whereabouts and military status, even when there are several thousands of miles between him and you.

What this is, then, is an unexpected, fresh and most unusual story of that War that like as not you have not come across before. What it is, is a narrative of how the entire century changed – where people with a nanny-cum-maid, a French tutor and piano lessons were forced away, and had to struggle to return on crowded trains in wartime, alongside parents that had been stripped of all class and prestige by a Soviet ideal. It shows a point in time that while the war encompassed a lot of the globe, the world these people knew expanded incredibly, as they found foreign corners to reside in afterwards. The book is really quite accessible, and while there's nothing to comment on as regards literary style, the selling point is how fresh and different this familiar-''seeming'' narrative is. I just wish the ending was not so emotionless and abrupt, otherwise this would have reached the highest rating.